The early English cotton industry

by George W. Daniels

III

Capitalist employers and even, to some extent, our wage-earning proletariat were to be found as early as the close of the thirteenth century in the chief urban centres of the textile industries in Flanders and Italy; and at first sight there seems little to distinguish the industrial conditions and the class relations prevailing in those centres from those described as existing in Lancashire between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The patrician draper of Douai in the last quarter of the thirteenth century[14] ran his business on lines which we find still maintained by the Chethams and the Mosleys of seventeenth-century Manchester. In both cases the capitalist was primarily a merchant with agents or partners in other cities, who bought his raw material from abroad and helped to put his goods on a distant market. At the industrial centre he had a warehouse and also a workshop where he employed a few workers chiefly in finishing the cloth or in preparing the material for manufacture. But his relation with most of those who were in effect his workpeople was ostensibly that of a trader. He sold them the materials of their craft and bought the finished products, allowing them credit for the interval.

The other form of industrial organisation found in eighteenth-century Manchester, in which the materials were delivered through putters-out to the cottage workers of the surrounding country, had been already fully developed by the Wool Gild of fourteenth-century Florence.[15]

What constitutes the vital difference between the conditions at Douai and Florence on the one hand, and those in Lancashire on the other hand, was the virtual monopoly of the employing function and of the supply of capital or credit which the civic constitution of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries gave to the patrician merchant or to the members of the wool gild, and which was entirely absent from the Manchester fustian or cotton industry. The weaver who obtained his materials from the Chethams or Mosleys might, if their terms were better, have got credit from the Irish yarn dealers or other “foreigners” who visited the Manchester market, and he was free to set up as an independent manufacturer as soon as he had acquired the necessary capital or credit. Such freedom, however, was by no means universal or even normal in the textile industries of sixteenth-century England. A monopoly of the employing function had grown up in the corporate burghs which were the older centres of the industry and the effect of the industrial and commercial policy of the sixteenth century was to give a national sanction to this monopoly, and to put a ban upon expansion or improvement.

One of the main instruments of that policy was the company of Merchant Adventurers. This was a cartel of English merchants, mainly Londoners, which had gradually gained a control of the export trade of cloth to Antwerp—the chief Continental market. Throughout the sixteenth century it sought to prevent the English clothier from exporting his own cloth and the foreign merchant from coming to buy it in England. At the same time it restricted the number of its own members and limited the amount of trade done by each. So far, therefore, from having been, as is commonly supposed, the main organ for the expansion of English trade, it constituted, in fact, the main hindrance to that expansion. In 1551-1552 the government of Edward VI., in order to raise from the Adventurers a desperately needed loan, gave an official sanction to their monopoly. It stopped the trade of the Hanseatic merchants who had recently been exporting over one-third of the rapidly increasing output of English cloth,[16] and it authorised the Adventurers to exclude other native merchants from the trade. As the Adventurers could not find a market for the whole national output, they complained of over-production.[17] The corporate boroughs which were the older privileged centres of the industry naturally supported this complaint, and a series of enactments from 1552 to 1563 (including the Statute of Weavers and the Statute of Apprentices) which endeavoured to restrict the expansion of the textile manufactures in the country districts were largely due to the combined influence of these two vested interests and to the fiscal needs of the Government.

The Hanseatic trade was restored under Philip and Mary, and during the first half of Elizabeth’s reign the German merchants continued to find a market for a considerable quantity of English cloth.

This additional channel through which capital and credit could flow in and out of the country was rendered more indispensable by the gradual stoppage of trade with Central Europe through the Netherlands. But in the second decade of Elizabeth fresh hostilities arose between the Merchant Adventurers who had settled at Hamburg and the Hanseatic League with the result that the German merchants were in 1576 excluded from trading in Blackwell Hall, and later in 1580 deprived of all their remaining privileges in England, whilst the Adventurers lost their foothold in Hamburg.[18] At the very moment when the foreign channels for the export trade were thus being closed the native channels were being seriously narrowed through the action of the same vested interests. The monopoly of the Merchant Adventurers extended only to the Low Countries and Germany. The trade with Spain and the Baltic, with Venice and the Levant and Morocco had been free to all Englishmen and had been opened up by enterprising merchants, frequently from the lesser parts, who more truly deserved the title of Adventurers than the corporate monopolists of the markets nearer home. But between 1575 and 1588 each of these branches of foreign commerce was monopolised by a chartered syndicate formed after the model of the Merchant Adventurers and controlled largely by the same group of Londoners. Prices went up by leaps and bounds. “When every nation,” said Harrison, “was permitted to bring in her own commodities ... we had sugar for fourpence the pound that now ... is well worth half-a-crown, raisins and currants for a penny that now are bidden at sixpence. I do not deny that the navy of the land is in part maintained by their traffic, but so is the price of wares kept up now that they have gotten the only sale of things upon pretence of better futherance of the common wealth into their own hands.”[19]

Far more serious, however, was the monopoly of the export trade in cloth. In 1586 the Privy Council was receiving alarming reports of the discontent in Somerset. The poorer sort, who were wont to live by spinning, carding and working of wool, were starving for lack of work and on the point of rebellion. An accidental fire at Bath was taken for a beacon lighted to proclaim a general rising. “This great matter of the lack of work,” writes Burleigh to Hatton, “not only of cloths, which presently is the greatest, but of all other commodities which are restrained from Spain, Portugal, Barbary, France, Flanders, Hamburg and the States, cannot but, in process of time, work a great change and dangerous issue to the people of the Realm, who heretofore in time of outward peace lived thereby, and without it must either perish for want or fall into violence to feed and fill their lewd appetites with open spoil of others, which is the root of rebellion.”

The remedy proposed by Burleigh was to undo at one stroke the whole effect of the restrictions that had been accumulating since 1564. To have more sales there must be more buyers and more ships. The Hanseatic trade must be restored. Other alien merchants must receive the same liberty and be encouraged to use it by lower export duties.[20] Blackwell Hall must be opened again to German buyers, and if the Londoners refused, a cloth hall must be set up at Westminster. Finally, the exportation of cloth must be free to all English merchants whether members of the Adventurers’ Company or not.[21] But the application of these sound remedies was frustrated by the war with Spain and the reign of Elizabeth closed with a period of intensified monopoly and of commercial depression.[22]

The expansion of the textile industries of England, which there is no reason to doubt was taking place at this period, is clearly not to be placed to the credit of Elizabethan statesmanship. It took place almost entirely in the district exempted from the Weavers Acts. Foremost amongst those districts were Lancashire and the West Riding, which thus enjoyed the advantages of comparative laissez faire at a time when restrictions on the creation and the free flow of capital were part of the accepted national policy.